Asda is ramping up its digital content strategy for its financial brand Asda Money as it looks to further bolster its natural search.

The supermarket has appointed UK content agency Search News Media to manage and broaden its content output for its financial services on Asda Money.

Asda Money’s head of marketing Joanne Donoghue said the appointment marks a “critical” part of its overal digital strategy. “This will give us greater breadth and depth of content in the future. We have launched the site with news, articles and guides, and we will develop that further employing more sophisticated SEO tactics to develop our natural search footprint,” she said.

The move has been partly prompted by the multiple changes Google has made to its algorithm over the last year, rolling out updates, including Panda and Penguin, which focus on prioritisng quality content sites, according to Donoghue.

“Our agencies are very mindful of our natural back-linking strategy, not buying links or anything like that, but ensuring everything is done in the correct way. It’s important we earn our links, Likes and contacts, rather than buy them,” she added.

Google’s Penguin rollout was the latest update to cause a stir between search and PR companies, with the latter claiming they are seeing an increasing demand from clients to build quality SEO links. They attributed this increase in demand to Google’s clampdown on black-hat SEO tactics in its Penguin algorithm update (nma.co.uk 10 May 2012).

Asda Money will work with Search News Media to determine what topics and issues its customers are most interested in, by monitoring Asda’s panel Mumdex, and its Baby and Toddler Club forum. Search News Media will then develop further in-depth surveys centred specifically on the topics generating the most interest form Asda customers, and will provide experts to help inform related articles.

Asda Money was rebranded from Asda Finance earlier this year in a bid to (nma.co.uk 17 July 2012).